“The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”
(Eshun 1998, 00[-001])
- 1 As Mark Fisher puts it, “[the weird] is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation (...)
- 2 Throughout the text, I have used bees as opposed to honeybees more specifically to underline the im (...)
- 3 Here, Blade Runner Universe, or simply Blade Runner, refers to all productions inspired by Philip K (...)
1In a beautiful, honey-hued scene in Denis Villeneuve’s film Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Ryan Gosling’s character, K (also known as KD6-3.7), arrives in the ruins of an abandoned city resembling Las Vegas. Their purpose there is to locate Rick Deckard, the main character of the original Blade Runner (1982) film, played by Harrison Ford in both movies. Before coming into contact with Deckard, K experiences a weird and eerie1 encounter when a bee peacefully lands on their hand and steers them to a fully active apiary of about ten beehives (Villeneuve 2017, 1:40:32–1:42:20).2 For a brief moment, the apocalyptic, muffled silence of the scene is replaced by the characteristic buzzing noise of an apiary, sonically bringing other-than-human biotic life back to the fore, otherwise hauntingly absent from the Blade Runner Universe (Fig. 1).3
Fig.1 A view of Deckard’s apiary
The apiary which is located in the wreckage of a blasted city
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 01:41:37
2Blade Runner 2049 (BR2049) depicts a late capitalist future where high-tech utopias have been established at the cost of the planet Earth. A central part of the elite economical success are replicants—enslaved bioengineered synthetic humanoids, designed to serve and harvest resources on off-world colonies. But when these synthetic slaves rebel, and find refuge on Earth, they are hunted down and retired (killed) by Blade Runners, also known as Replicant Detector Units. In BR2049, most biotic other-than-humans have been wiped out, with the few remaining ones becoming the ultimate token of wealth.
3This bee scene is therefore iconic, as it is the only appearance of biotic other-than-human life in the entire movie, simultaneously invoking several questions central to Blade Runner, including: what it means to be human, the fate of animals, and the role of technology in a late-capitalist future. Why bees and what exactly does Villeneuve try to convey by bringing to the stage the age-old beehive metaphor? Bees have been used as metaphors throughout history to support various political ideologies—from monarchy to communism, anarchism to feudalism, and nowadays democracy (Tavoillot 2015; Seeley 2010). In recent years, they also became a mascot for the environment. Frequently compared to a canary down a coal mine, the presence of bees is viewed as an indicator of safety. However, this notion is misleading; bees alone cannot save the world. Despite being a mascot, moreover, bee populations are worryingly decreasing worldwide every year (Zattara and Aizen 2021). According to Villeneuve himself, bees are used as a metaphor to bring hope to this dystopic future (Murphy 2017, 1). He elaborates that the apiary is present in his movie to show that technology is not only about developing new weapons, but also new ways of farming (Skrebels 2018, 1). This is analysed in the same way by Timothy Shanahan (2019, 25), who writes that the presence of bees in the film could be seen as a sign of hope, which is corroborated by K when they spot the bees’ thermic signature (Fig. 2) on their car’s digital sensors, and exclaim: “Life.”
Fig.2 Bees’ thermic signature showing up on K’s flying car control monitor
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 01:37:35
4For the past two decades, monitoring devices, made possible by accessible low-cost components and the miniaturisation of technology, have infiltrated beehives, transforming them into small technologised sites of data production called smart hives or Electronic Monitored Hives (EMHs). Smart hives are the main development from an emerging form of beekeeping called Precision Beekeeping (PB) which ubiquitously reshapes age-old practices. PB is part of a larger programme which has seen sensing technology slowly and slyly transforming our relationship with our planet, and has simultaneously transformed the Earth in return (Gabrys 2016). From rising sea levels, to changes in bird migration patterns, we increasingly experience ecologies by means of sensors and data. Catastrophic daily news about anthropogenic effects—and even our knowledge of the new geological era we live in named the Anthropocene—stem from a synthetic layer of sensors spread around the globe. The wiring up of our planet expands and strengthens our understanding of environments and worlds beyond human sensorial reach, enabling new forms of intimacies with previously inaccessible worlds (Helmreich 2009).
5Using Blade Runner as guide, this paper explores the past, present, and futures of beekeeping within the broader discussion of the digitisation of ecology. Beekeeping is a small field, and modern beekeeping is subject to developments taking place in industrial agriculture (Kosek 2019, 149). As what happens in farming guides and impacts beekeeping, we will take a detour into the present and future of farming, looking at the development of Precision Agriculture (PA) and the depiction of farming in BR2049. However, first comes an outline of the methods used; then, it will be followed by a semiotic and material historical journey into the past and present of monitoring devices used in beekeeping; after, we will unpack the results of an ongoing ethnography on the forthcoming of digital sensors in beekeeping; and to conclude, we will explore an ongoing collaborative artwork which takes the form of a blueprint and a manifesto, unveiling the potential power of PB to counteract destructive practices taking place in apiculture.
6Faced with the failure of our political institutions, I created a Ministry of Bees called Apian in 2014. Apian is in charge of maintaining and fostering human relationships with all bee species. The methods used for this paper stem directly from Apian’s methodology, which consists of a philosophically-imbued anthropological approach and the practices of art and beekeeping. Being a beekeeper is a considerable help when it comes to establishing contact and gaining trust with other fellow beekeepers and bee lovers, and this is an integrant part of this research. An example of Apian’s work is the paper you are reading, which is part of ongoing multimedia explorations into the effect of digitisation on beekeeping practices.
7More specifically, this paper stems from two different phases of research. The first phase was conducted during a master’s degree in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin with fieldwork taking place between October 2017 and May 2018. Approximately twenty-five semi-structured interviews were made with amateur beekeepers (from France, Germany and Switzerland), smart hive developers (from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the USA), and bee scholars (from France, Germany, Italy and the USA). All interviews were recorded, conducted either in English or French, transcribed verbatim and coded. The second phase, which is still ongoing, started a year after my master thesis and has followed a similar pattern, albeit in a much more scattered way, as I constantly go in and out of the field due to the precarious nature of independent research. For more info, please visit: www.apian.ch.
8In BR2049, the capitalist overlord Niander Wallace (played by Jared Leto), designer of the replicants, saved humanity from starvation by developing an agricultural technology—a technofix or technological fix—called synthetic farming. A technofix is the idea that technology on its own, independently from its socioeconomics, can fix a problem. Synthetic farming—BR2049’s farming practice—is depicted in one of the film’s first scenes. Sapper Morton (also known as NX-8237.6), played by Dave Bautista, runs a small protein farm breeding worms on Earth. K has been ordered to retire (kill) Sapper on suspicion of them being a replicant. When K lands at the farm, Sapper is working in a greenhouse, collecting worms by hand. Around Sapper we can see large transparent plastic tanks, resembling IV bags, filled with a greenish liquid. Worms are hooked up to these drips, bringing attention to the precarious nature of these practices. It seems that part of their secretion feeds back into these IV bags, turning the system into a negative feedback loop which maintains homoeostasis in the worm pond (Fig. 3).
Fig.3 A view from inside Sapper Morton’s worm farm
Sapper is in the middle of the frame working in a pond, surrounded by large plastic bags filled with greenish liquids.
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 00:03:18
9Sapper is wearing a fully-sealed suit, more akin to a space suit than a farmer’s outfit, likely to protect themselves from various chemicals used in the farming process. It is worrying to see that even high-tech androids need protection against pesticides used to cultivate food in this future—an idea reinforced by the next scene when Sapper exits the greenhouse and goes under a decontamination shower. Synthetic farming, as pictured in BR2049, reflects today’s industrial agriculture practices and depicts its most likely evolution under capitalism. It mixes various current and emerging developments in agriculture, such as the engineering of species, animals and plants for food production with hydroponics culture (the practice of growing food without soil in controlled environments), and most probably Precision Agriculture.
10According to Wikipedia (n.d.), conventional agriculture, or industrial agriculture, is a modern practice which came into being as part of the Industrial Revolution. Amongst other specific characteristics, it involves the mechanisation of food production on a large scale; genetic technology and the patent to protect genetic information; the development of synthetic pesticides; and a model of food production embedded in global trade. These developments allow more people to be fed for less monetary investments with fewer employees as automation expands. Despite some great accomplishments, this form of agriculture is also responsible for many ecological and social pitfalls. To give just one example, the large scale use of synthetic pesticides, which results from industrial agriculture, is constantly lowering the diversity and population of insect pollinators worldwide; and it is one of the main threats to bees today. Ironically, Jake Kosek (2019) shows that industrial agriculture is particularly dependent upon bees as slaves of its system of production. He explains how the possibility to move bees around easily, modern beekeeping tools (especially modern hives, and more on that below), and bee pollination skills have made industrial agriculture possible (149). Simultaneously, these practices transform the bees in return—their own chemistry—literally reshaping their bodies and internal organs (160). As Kosek puts it, “[t]he modern bee maladies have as much to do with economic privatisation and austerity as they do with pesticides and pathogens” (Kosek 2019: 166).
11For the past forty years, agriculture has slowly been digitalised, reshaping farmers’ relationships with their land and modes of production (Pierpaoli et al. 2013). The promises of this digitisation are myriad, but in short PA proposes to develop more sustainable practices by using various sensing devices. Sensors can reduce the amount of pesticides used, by targeting specific areas rather than blanketing entire fields. Similarly, the constant soil monitoring can help farmers manage larger farms, increasing production whilst needing fewer employees. Resembling something out of a science fiction film, prototypes such as Prospero—an electronic harvesting machine nicknamed “agricrab,” developed by David Dorhout and promoted by the German company Bayer AG—proposes to replace farmers’ hard manual labour (Murray 2018). Swarms of autonomous robots crawl over monocrop fields to manage pests, raise alerts of various diseases, and plant seeds; farmers become shepherds, guardians of a herd of crab-like machines who have become their extended phenotypes.
12Under the veneer of green capitalism, however, which allegedly promotes the development of more sustainable practices, PA is rather, as Christopher Miles puts it, “an intensification of conventional agriculture presented as a radical break” (2019, 8). This shift has led to a deeper penetration of capital into farms and farmers’ lives, ubiquitously reshaping their work from autonomous skilled labour to automated deskilled wage labour (Miles 2019), or with the words of Nick Murray (2018), from “agrarian to wage labour.” The intimate relation between the development of these sensing systems and companies who produce seeds or chemicals is exemplified by Bayer AG who are at the forefront of this shift. This relationship tightened when Bayer AG bought the pesticide firm Monsanto in 2018 (Murray 2018). Digital technology’s main application in farming, therefore, seems to aim at maximising yield, increasing efficiency, cutting labour costs, reinforcing dominating supply chains, and strengthening big corporations’ grip over farmers. PA’s sustainability, as sold by large companies, is not ecological, rather it is concerned with sustaining capitalism itself. BR2049 shows that capitalism does not care about biodiversity, the generated pollution, or even the Earth at large; it is a belief system that solely works towards its own survival, at all costs.
13The farming depicted in BR2049, however, is not the high-tech ideal sold by PA; Sapper Morton still continues hard work such as harvesting worms by hand. Compared to PA’s marketing, synthetic farming seems much more rudimentary, more akin to a post-apocalyptic future which sent human civilisation back to the Stone Age rather than to a world of high-tech bioengineered humanoids and flying cars. This is not, however, as puzzling as it sounds when considering the world is still ruled by capitalism in BR2049. When large companies start to form an oligopoly (when a small number of companies own the market), they tend to restrict certain technological developments and investment in research and development, especially if they could result in increased competition. For instance, big firms establish complex bureaucratic gates to slow down the development of new ideas or they buy patents which have the potential to challenge their control and bury them for as long as possible (Howard 2016). In BR2049, as much as today, therefore, the supposed drive of technological development—capitalism—is holding back greater discoveries.
- 4 Foreboding BR2049’s bee scene, Deckard’s experimental apiary was already attempted by the MIT Media (...)
14Now let us rewind to the scene which opened this article. In Deckard’s apiary, encountered by K in the middle of a blasted city, bees are hived in Langstroth models—a modern and standard beehive and one of the most-used hives worldwide today (Fig. 4).4
Fig.4 A close-up of Deckard’s apiary
There one can notice that he uses Langstroth models to hive bees.
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 01:41:47
15Bees are seemingly fed by artificial columns of food (as shown in the background of Fig. 4), akin to the worms in Sapper Morton’s farm that we discussed before. Similarly, this apiary is a cybernetic bee farm, feedback loops maintain homoeostasis within the hives. After passing through the apiary, K finds Deckard in their apartment, likely the former bar of an abandoned casino. When the camera enters the flat, we briefly see some apian materials on the right. There are some standard frames (in modern beekeeping bees build their combs on movable frames which allow beekeepers to inspect every nook and cranny of the hive), some harvesting material such as a honey extractor (a machine based on a centrifugal force to extract honey), a smoker (smoke is used to calm bees), some jars full of honey, and some large plastic bags full of honey, reminiscent of those we saw in Sapper’s farm at the beginning of the film (Fig. 3). Perhaps Deckard uses the bee’s own honey to feed them—something which is done by certain beekeepers to mitigate the effect of surrogate food. As with synthetic farming, the beekeeping techniques used by Deckard appear highly antiquated—almost identical to today’s practices.
- 5 For more about beehive history, see Kritsky (2010); and Apian (2020).
16Before delving deeper into the future of beekeeping, let us embark on a material and semiotic journey into beekeeping’s past and present, with the aim of understanding the origin of the system at the heart of Precision Beekeeping (PB): the smart hive. As a reminder, and to avoid misconceptions, a smart hive is not a new type of hive design or a technology in itself; rather, it is a set of electronic monitoring devices (built upon information technology) that can potentially go inside any type of beehive. For reasons unknown, the study of the hive has gained little attention; preservation has been neglected and made difficult by the fragile materials used to build hives such as mud, straw, withies, and wood, to give a few examples. As a result, there is a distinct lack of surviving, physical evidence, which makes hive history difficult to draw and any attempt is rather sketchy. Here the idea is not to tell the full history of the beehive—this was the focus of another work by Apian (2020), but to focus on the historical development of monitoring devices designed for beekeeping, including certain hives and other technology adapted for apian purposes.5 The first mechanical device used to monitor bees was likely a scale, giving beekeepers watch over the honey flow; if the weight of the hive increases, it is likely that bees are bringing back nectar, which is later transformed into honey. Monitoring practices leapt forward with the development of observational—or glass—hives during the 1500s and late 1600s (Crane 1999, 379). This hive model enabled direct visual access to bees, which allowed key developments in our understanding of bee behaviour. For instance, Karl von Frisch discovered the waggle dance—the figure of eight shape bees used to communicate within the hive—using an observational hive, which earned him a Noble Prize in 1973 (Fig. 5; left). In the eighteenth century, François Hubber, with the help of François Burnens, designed the first “rational” beehive called the “leaf beehive” (Fig. 5; top right). This structure allows beekeepers to open and inspect every corner of the hive. Given this heightened level of scrutiny, Juan Antonio Ramirez (2000, 27) saw mutual inspirations between Hubber’s design and Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prisons which are often seen as the ultimate modern symbol of surveillance.
Fig. 5 Three different beehives: an observational hive, a “leaf” hive, and a “Nutt” hive.
On the left: working with his observation hive, Karl von Frisch uses a protractor to measure the direction of an eight-figure dance (Lehnherr and Hans-Ulrich 2003).
Top right: This hive, known as a “leaf hive,” is bound on one side by an attachment system, and free on the other side. When you look closely at this type of hive, designed primarily for observing bees, you can rightly think that it paved the way for the movable frame designs about to take shape a few years later (Cuisenier 1981).
Bottom right: A example of a Nutt collateral hive (Showler 1985).
- 6 While this barbaric practice stopped centuries ago, it ironically came back in another form, stemmi (...)
17A few decades later, Thomas Nutt designed the Nutt hive (Fig. 5; bottom right) which can be seen as a proto-monitored hive. Of interest here is not the structure itself—a combination of multiple wooden boxes—rather, the in-built devices. Nutt equipped the hive with a thermometer, used to monitor the temperature, and a ventilation system to respond to the hive’s temperature. For instance, the ventilation system could be used to cool down certain parts of the hive, sparing bees from “fanning” (vibrating their thoraxes to cool down the hive) during the height of summer. If bees did not have to do this themselves, Nutt believed, they could concentrate on other tasks such as gathering nectar to produce more honey. He praised the thermometer as the ultimate “scientific tool” to understand and transform the world of bees (Nutt 1832, 27). Today, however, most of his claims and ideas regarding bee biology have been proven wrong and the Nutt hive never gained any popularity; it remained a luxurious rarity (Kritsky 2010, 120). To promote his design, Nutt wrote a manual called Humanity to Honey-bees, published in 1832. It is an odd manifesto for the future of beekeeping which explained his idiosyncratic view of bees, unveiling his ideology and political position, which he also aimed to infuse upon bees. Bringing humanity to bees, meant stopping a barbaric practice still in place in Europe at that time—in short, beekeepers were suffocating bees with sulphur to simplify the harvest (Crane 1975).6 While often put forward by Nutt, this does not seem to be the core of his idea. As a fervent admirer of the Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms (the book is actually dedicated to the Queen), Nutt did not hesitate in comparing beehives with the commonwealth’s dominions. His insistence on controlling bees via technological means, and his constant imposition of colonial metaphors upon them, therefore, can also be regarded as an attempt to bring his own modernity to bees. In other words, he was attempting to apply principles of productivity and slavery, in place at the time, directly to bees and apian practices.
18The smart hives of today also stem from one last hive model which has reified centuries of experiments. In 1852, Reverend Langstroth patented the so-called modern hive, making the rational beekeeping practices initiated by François Hubber largely available by simplifying its design and rendering it prone to industrial production (the same hives as the one used by Deckard in BR2049, see Fig. 4). Its patenting and the following standardisation allowed modern beekeeping to spread worldwide. After that, hive design entered a dormant period for roughly 160 years until digital devices ubiquitously infiltrated bee houses.
- 7 For a detailed overview of sensors used for monitoring bees see Marchal et al. (2020, 358).
19Two centuries later, in 1960, the first electronic sensor dedicated to monitoring bees, called the Apidictor, was designed by the British beekeeper and BBC sound engineer Eddie F. Woods. This device is a frequency analyser which can detect specific sounds that a queen makes before swarming (Bromenshenk et al. 2015, 683). Swarming is the way bee organisms reproduce; the old queen leaves the hive with a group of bees, leaving behind fresh eggs and young bees to raise a new queen. Up to forty days before swarming takes place, the queen emits a specific sound—called quacking—which becomes louder and more frequent as the day to leave the hive approaches (Hrncir, Barth, and Tautz 2005). This device aims to detect this sound early enough to help beekeepers prevent bees from swarming. While its accuracy was never proven, it inspired promising developments in PB. It remains one of the few devices specifically designed for bees, as most of the digital sensors used to monitor bees are primarily borrowed from other industries. Three decades later, in the 90s, the first electronic monitoring system was put together. It combined an electronic scale (which measures the honey yield), bee counters (to monitor the number of bees in the hive), and humidity and temperature sensors (to keep track of the organism status), which simultaneously turned the hive into a weather station (Marchal et al. 2020, 357). Up until the noughties, these sensors were reserved for bee researchers and university departments. The drop in the price of digital technology has led to the spread of these apparatuses into beekeepers’ gardens and commercial apiaries. Today smart hives range from US $100 to US $800 for a ready-made kit; DIY kits can be cheaper. In addition to the digital sensors cited before such as electronic scales, bee counters and humidity/temperature sensors, there are also some systems that include microphones, video cameras (for surveillance of the apiary), infrared cameras, light sensors, Co2 and other pollutant sensors, and so on.7 Currently, most systems on the market include, in ascending order of popularity: scales, temperature and humidity sensors, microphones, bee counters, and anti-theft GPS systems. These digital sensors continuously gather data at different rates, ranging from every minute to once a day. Data are then sent to a platform—either an app or website—where beekeepers can monitor their hives from afar. The gathered data is accessible via graphs in a raw format; however, newer systems also use algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to select the relevant data and facilitate the beekeeper’s tasks. Before ending up in the hands of beekeepers, the data is then processed by algorithms who decide what matters or not regarding bee behaviour.
20Language used to promote smart hives currently available on the market is telling of the intention behind most smart hives programmes. During the 4th International Bee and Hive Monitoring Conference (2020), the wording and language used to sell and promote smart hives has not evolved since their inception. Here, Thomas Nutt’s (1832, 1) words would not have felt odd: “Upon an improved and humane plan, by which the lives of bees may be preserved, and abundance of honey of a superior quality may be obtained.” He adds, “swarming may be prevented” (6). At the conference, most lectures revolved around the idea of precision and the gathering of vital information about bee statuses to help beekeepers make timely decisions which would reduce their losses and increase their productivity. Many speakers underlined the objectivity brought by digital technology; and to support their arguments, they put to the fore that such technology was either founded by scholars or made in close collaboration with universities. While overall it seems to be true, the scientific argument, however, is only here to support an aperspectival view on digital technology and never to question how and for what purpose we should use and design these sensing systems. Potential technical failures and glitches were never mentioned. Ultimately, this alleged objectivity is bluntly anthropocentric and never tries to include bees in the process.
21As these digital sensing systems are still in their infancy, navigating them is a minefield, and smart hives oscillate between well-intentioned projects and greenwashing scams. It is also nearly impossible to know the reliability of the systems offered by different companies without undertaking an in-depth survey which has not been conducted so far. Glass hives and the “leaf beehive,” both classic architectures of surveillance and control, coupled with the use of mechanic devices to increase bee productivity, and the standardisation brought by Langstroth’s design, form the historical roots of smart hives. Therefore, the programme behind Precision Beekeeping (PB) stems from the alliance of apian architecture of surveillance and control, sensing technology, and colonial methods of control. This resonates with the words of the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB): “Intelligent machines of enslavement, surveillance and incarceration are today’s weapons of colonialism and planetary control, adding another twist to the universal entanglement of capitalism and colonialism” (2020, 1). While the history of smart hives and monitoring bees need to be unveiled and taken seriously, it does not mean that these technological systems have their own agency and cannot be used for better purpose. To fully grasp their meaning, these systems need to be put into context.
22In 2017, I began an ongoing ethnography on the digitisation of beekeeping practices, the methods of which I outlined previously as two research phases consisting of several interviews with beekeepers, bee scholars, and smart hive developers; fieldwork; and personal experiments with smart hive technology. My primary results show that the beekeeper adoption rate of smart hives varies considerably depending on their age, their geographical location in relation to their apiaries (close or far from their homes), their financial situation (Precision Beekeeping [PB] is currently an expensive practice, adding to the already-expensive practice of beekeeping [Kosek 2019, 157]), and ultimately the size of their apiary.
- 8 All interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.
23While most interviewees are embracing smart hives, seeing potential improvement in their practice, a few expressed concerns towards the impact digitisation could have upon their relationship with bees. For instance, they raised a fear of disconnection with their bees. According to one interviewee, Jakob, some farmers lose connection with their animals because their relations become mostly mediated by technology rather than their own body.8 They believe that physical contact with animals is key to keeping a healthy relationship, that close and frequent somatic encounters prevent farmers or beekeepers from treating their other-than-human co-workers badly. A similar feeling was shared by a mill worker interviewed by Shoshana (Zuboff 1988, 84) in her ethnography about the forthcoming of smart machines at the end of the last century: “[t]he information tells them that somewhere out there something is happening but it doesn’t seem to affect you because it is so remote.”
- 9 “The act of beekeeping involves perception – a responsive performance of mind/body and bee. Much li (...)
24Most beekeepers’ skills are lodged into their sentient body. Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut (2013, 92–93) give a beautiful description of the essence of beekeeping in their ethnography of urban apiculture in New York City. They describe it as a performative practice, a choreography between the human mind/body and the bees, much akin to a dance, where senses of both species overlap and collide in a ritualistic process.9 These features seem to have prevented beekeepers from being fully reached by Taylorism’s central law: the division between physical efforts and intellectual skills. Manual labour is separated from intellectual efforts to increase production and reinforce hierarchy. Using digital sensors to enhance beekeepers could end up substituting their own senses for synthetic ones. This could start a process of de-skilling, making beekeeping practices more permeable to capital infiltration, akin to what is happening in farming (Miles 2019), reinforcing a trend already taking place in modern beekeeping (Kosek 2019).
- 10 Christian in discussion with the author, video call, 21 December 2017.
25Meanwhile, Zuboff (1988) underlines the risk of dependence on automation and machines; the ripple effects of system failures can quickly escalate and be critical. While automation could sound far-fetched in beekeeping, there are some smart hive developers that already work towards it. For instance, another interviewee, Christian, designed a prototype which aims to make beekeeping fully automated. The hive’s prototype is full of sensors which allow machines to operate it on its own. It is designed to be carried on driverless trucks from an apiary to an extraction centre where it could be opened, harvested and then sent back to its apiary without any human intervention.10 Simpler automated systems, however, could lead to setbacks and glitches; for instance, a timely harvest could be missed, or an infection’s disease could spread, leading to the beehive’s death—an apian version of death by GPS.
26It would be a mistake, however, to believe that these risks stem directly from the technology itself. Smart hives do not prevent beekeepers from visiting their hives, neither spending time in their apiary—putting profit over everything else does. In the first Blade Runner, Deckard told Rachael: “Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard” (Scott 1982, 00:17:40). Science-fiction films have a unique relation with technology and they can be roughly put in two groups. On one side, there is a more conservative perspective which offers a technophobic view of machines, scared by their potential to shatter social hierarchy and archaic dogmas. On the other side, we have a more progressive view such as the one proposed by the Blade Runner Universe which underlines the power of certain technologies to help humanity build a better future—a view that sees technology not as inherently bad but simply seized with wrong intentions (Ryan and Kellner 1990, 64–65). The conservative view ontologises technology, infuses it with an essence and believes that technology can be understood independently from its context.
27Ethnographic data gathered for this paper simultaneously shows that digital sensors enable beekeepers to develop surprisingly new forms of intimacies with their bees. Part of the smart hive promise is to help create less disturbance for bees by physically separating them from beekeepers. But smart hives go beyond simply reducing human activity in the hive. Coining the term intimacy without proximity, Jacob Metcalf (2008: 115–116) argues that, despite being temporally and spatially distant, grizzly bears and humans have developed surprisingly intimate relations without never encountering each other as such. Many interviewees notice a change in their relations with bees stemming from the use of sensing systems, as the beekeeper Alain shared during our discussion in Switzerland:
- 11 Alain in discussion with the author, 29 December 2017, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Emphasis added.
28We already say “our bees,” so we can say that we are already quite close to them, but [a smart hive] simplifies the connection. We feel closer to them and we know what is happening, which is reassuring. I would say it creates a bridge between us.11
- 12 Laurent in discussion with the author, video call, 11 November 2017.
29This impression was largely acknowledged by other beekeepers and the daily data collection seems to allow one “to be live in the hive”—as another interviewee Laurent put it.12 Numerous interviewees noticed they were “addicted” to the daily update from their smart hives. Some interviewees also highlighted the intimacy created during the winter—a time when beekeepers rarely get close to their apiaries in Europe. Currently, the information gained from smart hives in winter is quite basic; it consists of knowing if they are dead or alive but this already reshapes certain relationships. Meanwhile, feedback from the hive allows for a deeper understanding of bee behaviour, as noted by smart hive developer Reza:
- 13 Reza in discussion with the author, video call, 3 November 2017. Emphasis added.
30When you give them varroa [parasite] treatment you can see the stress it causes to the colony, so you feel slightly more sorry for your bees than you would if you just put in the treatment and walked away. You can see them fanning, you can see that they’re struggling to maintain a normal status in their hive … so you become more intimate with them. You get slightly closer to them from the monitoring.13
31In his critique of Precision Agriculture (PA), Miles (2019, 9) notes that there is no inherent reason for digital sensing devices to allow the development of more sustainable practices. Miles’s results critically express that farmers need to be included in the equation, not as simple observers of the machines, but as actors; enhanced farmers, not digitally proletarianised workers. Similarly, digital sensing technology should not be designed to replace beekeepers but to enhance and empower them. Yet, digital devices are complex machines. To use them for a more socialist agenda, some specific built-in components, like wires and circuits, will have to be ripped off, and some connections will need to be abandoned in favour of others. We will have to reroute and privilege certain synapses. These sensing machines can help generate new ways of working with bees, new forms of intimacies, but they first have to be ripped from their capitalist mould.
32The Blade Runner Universe depicts a late capitalist future far from ultramodern cities and their sleek imagery; instead it embraces the aesthetic of decay. Whereas it shows high-tech developments such as flying cars, bioengineered humanoids, and so on, waste is always somewhere in the background when it is not in the foreground (Bruno 1990, 185). When K looks for answers about their alleged memory, they find it in an orphanage located in a wasteland in San Diego (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6 Orphanage located in a wasteland
K, who is in the middle left of the frame, in a sort of Kasper David Friedrich gimmick scene, overlooks the waste land where the orphanage they are looking for is located.
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 01:05:35
33Neither technophobic nor technophilic, BR2049 shows technology’s constant ambiguity: technology saved humanity from starvation but at the cost of generating piles of pollutant waste. Information technology, clouds, smart devices and so on are often thought as immaterial or dematerialised objects. The average thirty-five million tons of discarded electronic trash per year are equivalent to 1,000 elephants every hour, suddenly, these immaterial objects appear “deeply material” (Gabrys 2011, 14). Precision Beekeeping (PB) is reliant on plastic, metal, solvents, silicon and so on—tons of waste producing devices, impacting environments with serious ecological consequences. These apparatuses rely on valuable metals extracted from conflicted countries which after a short life span, worsened by a planned obsolescence, circle back to urban slums in “China, India and Nigeria,” often close to where they were extracted from in the first place (Gabrys 2011, 15). Images of children collecting precious metal from out of order technology in BR0249 is not from a far future, but it is exactly what happens today with expired digital devices (Fig. 7). Child labour is used to recycle and “eliminate” these apparatuses from capitalist epicentres.
Fig. 7 A scene of child labour
One can see numerous children dismantling electronic devices on small table sitting directly on the ground
Film still from Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve 2017, 01:07:16
34Contrary to traditional beehives, whose longevity was curtailed by the use of fragile materials, smart hives will outlive all other beekeeping tools. Future archaeologists excavating ancient apiaries will probably only find artefacts made of silicon, plastic, and various metals—weird digital apparatuses covered with wax, propolis and pollen. Any attempt to make earnest ecological and socially sustainable Precision Beekeeping (PB) needs to consider the question of pollution generated by the production of digital technology in the first place. Yet, as stated by Gabrys (2011), neither a garbage planet nor a zero-waste promised land has to be sought after. Solutions are in reuse, maintenance and collective ownership of the means of production. Although monitoring a single beehive helps the beekeeper to develop new forms of beekeeping practices, PB reaches its full potential when it is collectively owned. Gathered data from smart hives can be uploaded online (privacy options are possible), so this data can be accessed by other beekeepers or scholars and archived. This can create a network of beehives or as the European project IoBee punned it: an internet of bees (2018). This web of hives could transform beekeeping from a local and isolated practice to a planetary one, enmeshing bees with other pollinators, bridging rural and urban areas to tackle bee threats globally. More practically, it means two particular outcomes. First, it creates a network of apiaries that gives beekeepers—without access to a monitoring system—the chance to glean information about neighbouring apiaries and work accordingly. Simultaneously, it puts forward the significance of the local, as a large part of the data is only relevant where it is collected. Second, it offers the possibility of a long-term record of bee environments, honey-yielding seasons, the spread of various diseases, and so on, generating enormous data sets for scholars and beekeepers alike. These networks enable beekeepers to become citizen scientists, and gather data which are equally worthwhile beyond apian applications. For instance, NASA gathers data from smart hives—ordinarily used to monitor honey yields—to track changes in blooming seasons in order to record the effect of global warming on flowers and plants (Atauri and Llorente 2009, 827). Once seized, these networks could have the potential to empower beekeepers by bringing them together in apian unions, creating counter-power to regain their means of production, and to reduce socioeconomic inequalities inherent in digital technology. Precision Beekeeping (PB) has to be developed within a broader planetary project; hubs, rather than individual apiaries should be prioritised. Close collaborations between scholars, smart hive developers and beekeepers are necessary, not in order to value smart hives on the market, but to build collective knowledge and new ways of keeping and collaborating with bees. Most beekeepers I interviewed were willing to share their data with the scientific and beekeeping community alike. If proper coordination between academia and beekeepers is fostered, we could soon encounter fascinating new discoveries about the world of bees. The question of data will play a key role in PB, and no doubt companies creating smart hives are highjacking data from beekeepers, as is happening in farming, but that is for another paper.
35In Postscript on the Society of Control, Gilles Deleuze (1992, 4) stated: “[t]here is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Villeneuve’s beehive metaphor in BR2049, as a sign of hope, is counterproductive; ultimately technology is always a weapon, being used to kill or feed people. Technology must be set free from capitalism to stop serving its destructive enterprise. Precision Beekeeping (PB) and its accompanying tools, smart hives in particular, can be used as a weapon to imagine and effectively create social beekeeping practices away from exploitation and endless production. Technology does not possess its own agency; however, it does not mean that specific agendas are not inbuilt. Hope is a lure; rather, new machines with their own inbuilt socialist, more-than-human ethics and anti-speciesist biases are needed.
36In collaboration with designers Harry Bloch and Joris Landman, and the visual anthropologist Ellen Lapper, I built a prototype and blueprint called The Intimacy Machine in the shape of an internet platform. It is a digital archive where university labs working with bees contribute their latest research in the form of videos, graphs, images, sound and more, allowing aesthetic encounters to provide an opportunity for learning about the world of bees without somatic disturbance, and on a more egalitarian basis. The Intimacy Machine is a blueprint for a better adoption of this technology, proposing to use it alternatively to how it was programmed—for care rather than endless production. These new devices, however, will have to be coupled with beekeepers’ sentient bodies. It must be stressed that beekeepers need to be given a central role in the development of post-capitalist Precision Beekeeping (PB). The Intimacy Machine is a weapon to fight back and establish a hymenopteran becoming of computation, in order to re-programme apiaries around the world, in alliance with bees, beekeepers and science.
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